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View Full Version : Fixing Opera on Netflix.com



Shane R. Monroe
01-16-2005, 09:54 PM
Well, I got tired of problems rating movies in Netflix with Opera, so I created a solution.

http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=806679#post806679

Enjoy.

Whose fault is this? Opera? Netflix? Hard to pin down. As always with Opera, there is a work around (had this been IE, you're simply out of luck).

For the technical minded, Netflix usees a little known HTTP header number 204 which was really designed for "inplace input" on a page (i.e. ranking a movie). However, while apparently its valid, there isn't a whole lot of information about it:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

... is about as official as you can get. It reads:

The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation. The response MAY include new or updated metainformation in the form of entity-headers, which if present SHOULD be associated with the requested variant. If the client is a user agent, it SHOULD NOT change its document view from that which caused the request to be sent. This response is primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place without causing a change to the user agent's active document view, although any new or updated metainformation SHOULD be applied to the document currently in the user agent's active view. The 204 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

At this stage, I'd be more likely to blame Opera (it did work before, btw - its only recently since Opera has put in 'friendly' error messages has it broken). Of course, I've been using the beta too long, I could chock it up to that.

In any event, this should fix ANY site using the 204 HTTP headers (I guess Amazon.com uses it too in places).

We now return you to your regular browser.

kittendaddy
01-16-2005, 10:09 PM
Thanks for the tip. I need to get the latest Opera.

Can 'friendly' error messages be disabled? I freakin' hate those things. I reject any bugs I get by QA people who only have a "page could not be displayed" message to tell me :).

Shane R. Monroe
01-17-2005, 09:03 AM
Not sure about disabling them in the current beta. Can probably be done with an INI hack :)

If there is an error on the page, you will get the error ... say, an ASP error. But if you get a x04 error, it will try to redirect.